Live the Party Life

Mother's Day 2017 After-Action Report

Now that Mother’s Day 2017 has come and gone, we need to address some serious issues about motherhood in America. Some of you will be offended by what I’m about to reveal. If you are, take a good hard look in the mirror, smash the glass into pieces, and turn on Facebook instead: self-examination isn’t for you.

We all love our pets. Dog culture, in all of its forms across Western civilization, embodies the notion of friendship in ways that bring a tear to the eye of anyone with the breadth of spirit to appreciate such a loving, decent animal. Me, I’m too cool to walk around the neighborhood carrying around a plastic shopping bag full of dog shit in one hand and a leash in the other, so I own a cat. Cat owners love cats. Cats love wet food and nothing else. They endure people because we bring them wet food sometimes.

The point is, pets are not kids. They’re not sons or daughters. Calling them “fur kids” is a pathetic attempt to encourage childless people to pretend that they’re parents. If you’ve got dogs and no kids, you’re not a parent of any kind. Stop embarrassing yourself. Stop redefining parenthood. Stop denigrating the difficult job real parents do to raise physically immature humans into emotionally immature adults. No matter how much you pamper your kitty or how many cute little outfits you squeeze your beagle into, your pets are not kids. They’re animals. Grow up. You want kids, have kids. Don’t fool yourself into thinking what you do is what parents do.

My family’s small. We have only one kid. To parents with multiple children, we’re barely parents ourselves. Maybe they’re right; I see moms and dads with 3 or 4 kids and think three things simultaneously: holy shit you look tired, better you than us, and you guys have got to be as tough as nails. The Pyramid of Patronization goes like this: parents with 4 kids look down on parents with 3, parents with 3 kids look down on parents with 2, and parents with one kid look down at married couples who don’t have children at all. We do. Don’t take it personally. You childless couples have the freedom to go on vacation alone, see a movie whenever you want, and leave the house without having to take ten minutes to cajole a small human into using the bathroom. Parents have everything else. So there’s a trade-off.

There are children without mothers. Children whose mothers have died recently. Children who were horribly abused by their mothers. There are women who have birthed stillborn children. Mothers of children who died last month under terrible circumstances. Widowers with young children. It is right and proper to grieve for them, to pray for them, to help them achieve a lessening of anguish, if not peace. Mother’s Day, whatever its original purpose may have been, is now a celebration of motherhood. And while we understand that others hurt, it is not our duty as a people to spare others the pain of our celebration. So be nice, but shove the trigger warnings over Mother’s Day. Everybody whining every day about not feeling included is why our culture is burrowing deeper and deeper into the gutter of microaggression avoidance, privilege-checking, and diversity-is-our-greatest-strength moral preening. Americans are, by and large, the most decent people on the planet; we don’t need to be protected against inadvertent insensitivity by tissue-skinned buffoons writing in the Washington Post.

Finally, this is what Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said on Mother’s Day:

https://twitter.com/CecileRichards/status/863752690614063106

You do recognize that she’s trolling, right? Richards understands full well that pro-lifers find everything she does to be disgusting and reprehensible. We never miss a trick to tell her so. Richards and her army of left-wing abortion enthusiasts have elevated the murder of babies in the womb to the level of sacrament, as a holy duty one must celebrate to avoid being labeled misogynist. Rather than acknowledging that abortion is the worst of all choices, Richards’s cohort goes the other way, encouraging women to celebrate their abortions. That’s a death cult darker than Robert E Howard’s most fevered imaginings, and its murderous practices are part of the Democrat Party platform.

We feel anguish for the women who felt they had to choose abortion, and pray that if they’re blessed with children once more, they choose to be mothers. They’re who I think of every Mother’s Day, and each day thereafter.